52 [Senate 



labor is so poorly rewarded. The truth is that passive intellectual 

 faculties are utterly valueless. They produce nothing. Hence, as 

 the mind of a human being lacks science or knowledge, the market 

 value of his mere physical force depreciates in price. Without going 

 into an elaborate argument, your committee appeal to the ten thou- 

 sand improvements of the age in which we live, as furnishing conclu- 

 sive evidence that there is no power on earth so productive of great 

 and beneficent results as the power of highly cultivated intellect. 



Those that follow the plow, and swing the axe, and gather the 

 harvest, have not, as a class, been instructed in the sciences which re- 

 veal nature's process for changing earth, air and water, into bread, 

 meat and clothing. Hence, to manufacture a barrel of pork, of flour, 

 a firkin of butter, or 100 pounds of wool, from the ingredients neces- 

 sary to form those agricultural staples, the farmer loses one-third or 

 one-half of his labor by its misapplication. To make one ripe wheat 

 plant, nature requires no fewer than fourteen simple and distinct ele- 

 mentary bodies. Each one of these substances has peculiar proper- 

 ties, and not one can serve as a substitute for another. 



The laws established by the Creator of the universe, which govern 

 all the changes in the form and properties of matter, whether in a 

 crude mineral or in an organized condition, making the living tissues 

 of plants and animals, are as uniform and unerring as the laws that 

 regulate the rising and the setting of the sun. By studying the ope- 

 ration of these laws, the practical agriculturist is often able to effect 

 a result in a day, which he could not accomplish in a week, while 

 working against the purposes of nature. 



It is not far from the truth to say, that 400,000 of the 700,000 chil- 

 dren now attending our common schools, are destined to become prac- 

 tical operatives in the great art of making something into grain, grass, 

 roots, milk, butter, cheese, wool, fat, lean meat, bone, or some of the 

 other numerous products of rural labor. Where that something can 

 be found, and how the raw materials of all cultivated plants should 

 be combined, so as to give the largest return for any given amount of 

 capital and manual toil, are problems in practical husbandry, which 

 science alone can solve. / 



If the ashes obtained by burning a ripe wheat, rye, oat, corn, bar- 

 ley or timothy plant, be analyzed, not far from 80 per cent will be 

 found to be silica, or common flint sand. This silica is an indispen- 

 sable ingredient in the above named crops ; and yet, not one parti- 



